I have been noticing in the last week or so how the tenor of advertising is starting to shift with the latest events in our economy. 

Last weekend, while relaxing into a Lifetime rerun of Grey’s Anatomy, I was struck by a Target (TGT) commercial that hit just the right note.

The spot is called “A New Day” and it shows a series of scenes designed to get viewers thinking about how to shift their day-to-day paradigm and still live well, despite financial constraints.

It opens with a close-up of a woman reading a newspaper with the headline “Economic Update,” and then the camera pulls out so you see her sitting at a table smiling at the guy she is with. The words on the screen say, “A new coffee spot” and at first glance you think it’s a café, but then you realize they’re home relaxing. The camera then focuses on the espresso maker on the counter.

In the next shot you see “The new wow” and it’s touting a snazzy red dress. From there it shows “The new salon trip” (hair color), “The new car wash” (glass cleaner) and “The new night club” (a lantern). In the latter two scenes, the company that developed the spot, Peterson Milla Hooks, incorporated a real family feel. The car-wash piece shows a father sitting in his car in his driveway while his two children joyfully help him clean it. In the final shot, it appears a grandfather is leading his two grandchildren in the dark with a lantern to a dock. The final words on the screen say, “A new day. New ways to save.”

This ad feels like a call to adventure at a time when so many people really need it.

So many of us can point to times in our lives when our parents hit a financial snag and yet made the best of it. In retrospect, how wonderful a lesson was that? And others of us can recall how it felt to be laid off at a time when we were woefully unprepared for it. So much of the experience parallels the normal stages of grief one goes through when someone dies -- shock, denial, guilt, anger, depression, and acceptance/hope.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column about what it was like to eventually derive meaning from my 2002 layoff and allow it to give birth to a whole new chapter in my life. However, what I left out were all the phases of grief that came before my acceptance/hope revelation. It wasn’t pretty. Ask anyone who knows me.

I’ve been working since the age of 14, mostly happily and productively. I was 40 years old the first time I was asked to leave a job on anyone’s terms but my own. It was shocking and surreal. I had done everything right. I had a life structure in place and suddenly the flow of money was going to change. I felt out of control and angry and eventually panicked.

Depending on the day, I wanted to alternately smack or throttle anyone who told me to get a roommate or buy cheaper coffee. The local antique furniture store, stationery shop and greeting card store all turned me away for a position. Temp agencies saw my 15 years of journalism experience and bluntly told me I was overqualified for the jobs they had. “If I’m willing to file and type correspondence, what does it matter?” I asked to no avail.

However, while all of this was happening, I was also experiencing an awakening to the joy of living simply. I learned to prioritize, compromise and feel gratitude in a way I should have been all along. It is so easy to live our lives in a way where all the focus is on working, going out for dinner, buying the latest fashions, shuttling kids around, or updating our many gadgets.

Call me crazy, but sometimes it can be liberating to order a simple cup of tea in a café instead of a $4 concoction. And, honestly, one of my favorite discoveries during my “lean” years was the recession special (two delicious hot dogs and a drink for about $3) at Gray’s Papaya in Manhattan -- I still go back periodically. I’ve learned to buy better, but fewer, clothes. I no longer have an ego attachment to splitting a bill evenly in a restaurant when I had a salad and an iced tea as opposed to an appetizer, entrée and two glasses of wine, but I still get to enjoy the group camaraderie.

This is what the Target commercial touched on. It brought me back to that time when I would have scoffed at the very suggestions of simplicity it makes, yet made me smile at how it all turned out.

I can only hope that enough individuals -- after weathering the shock and denial and anger of their current layoffs -- will embark on this call to adventure and the unknowable challenges that come with it to create a marked shift in thinking in our nation.

Then we will truly be living well.

Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.